Some extensions have a need to make the user aware of long running operations that usually happen in the background. Here are a few examples.

• the Java extension indicates the background installation of the Java language server
• the Azure Functions extensions indicates the generation of code
• the spell checking extension indicates checking in progress
• the Python extension indicates running unit tests

Since VS Code does not provide an API extensions invent their own way of progress reporting usually using status bar contributions. Some use words, some use ascii art, some use glyphs. Some show the progress on the right side, some in the left side. This does not

We'll explore what kind of progress reporting capabilities are most helpful to extensions and how we could expose those in our API.